Fiction-image-language-emotion (2012-2013)

FILE seminar, in connection with AVE and FICTION ANR projects, will focus on the study of emotions in art and fiction, by bringing together aesthetics, philosophy of mind, Chinese philosophy, theory of Chinese arts and cognitive sciences. We will explore, on the one hand, the relationship between perception of brush strokes and both emotional and aesthetic expressiveness (AVE) and, on the other hand, the nature of our emotional responses to fictions (FICTION).

December 6th from 10am to 12am: Agnes Moors(Ghent University and University of Geneva)

How do psychological theories of emotion explain that fiction can elicit emotions?

Starting from the observation that both real and fictional stimuli can cause emotions, the questions arise whether or not these two types of emotions (a) are different in nature (i.e., have different features), and (b) are caused by different underlying processes (and what these processes look like). I will tackle these questions from a psychological-theoretical perspective.I present an overview of four major psychological theories of emotion : appraisal theories, network theories, affect program theories, and constructivist theories. I discuss ways in which these theories define emotions, as well as the processes that they propose as being involved in emotion causation. After that I examine how these theories might fit emotions caused by fictional stimuli in their theories and how they would answer the above-mentioned questions.

April 10th from 3pm to 5pm:Johanna Fassl(Franklin College Switzerland and Columbia University)

Possibilities and Impossibilities : Newton’s Discovery of White Light and its Implications for Eighteenth-Century Venetian Art

The talk will investigate the importance of Newton’s discovery of the composition and property of light for a circle of artists associated with the radical Enlightenment in Venice. It will discuss the representation of the material property of light in the brushwork of the Giantonio Guardi and Giambattista Tiepolo and calibrate this type of idiom and rhetoric within the wider European intellectual culture of the time. What we find on the canvases of the early modern painters sets the stage for modernity, anticipating Impressionism, even Surrealism. In a final stage, the talk will touch on what modern neuroscience has revealed about consciousness formation and how the eighteenth-century artists and philosophers had an acute sense of how the human brain works

First part
Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it is the outcome of the coordinated action of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought, and emotion.
An important aspect of the aesthetic judgment is the role played by emotions that characterize this experience (Frijda, 2007 ; Scherer, 2004 ; Tan, 2000). The term aesthetic emotion refers to emotions arising during the process of aesthetic appreciation, such as when we observe an artwork
Several theories of emotion can be subsumed within the most current psychological perspective according to which emotions can be better studied and understood using a multi-componential approach (Frijda, 1986 ; Lazarus, 1991 ; Scherer, 1984, 2001), and in which an emotional episode is seen as consisting of a sequential and coordinated series of changes to different cognitive components : 1) appraisal, 2) arousal, 3) the expressive, 4) the motivational and 5) the subjective experience component. The focus will be on the explanation of the role of each component in the aesthetic experience.

Second part
Findings from empirical studies recently conducted will concern the existence of the automatic aesthetic evaluation. Several researches, employing explicit measures, have shown a general preference for figurative pictures compared to abstract ones (Feist & Brady, 2004) and for classical architecture rather than contemporary ones (Stamps & Nasar, 1997).
The aims will concern the existence of an automatic aesthetic evaluation : when we observe an artwork, an architecture or a design object, does the primary affective evaluation, in terms of pleasant or unpleasant, automatically appear to our mind ?
Three studies conducted using the Implicit Association Test will be reported. Findings of the first two studies on art and architecture showed that naive participants implicitly preferred figurative art and classical architecture (compared to abstract art and contemporary architecture), registering shorter latency times in associating positive adjectives to these categories (Mastandrea, Bartoli & Carrus, 2011). The third study aims to verify if expertise on industrial design (laypeople vs. experts) can orient implicit and explicit preferences towards different styles (classical vs. modern) of design chairs . Preferences resulted being moderated by expertise : experts were more aesthetically oriented towards modern than classical chairs while laypeople did not show a clear preference.
Results show that at some initial stage of the aesthetic experience preferences can also be experienced automatically. Automatic aesthetic processes within models of aesthetic experience will be discussed.

Since Colin Radford’s paper ‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?’ was published in 1975, philosophers (and others) have taken there to be a problem with our psychological interactions with fictional characters. This has become known as the ‘paradox of fiction’. The dominant view on this problem is that of Kendall Walton. This paper argues that there are a number of different problems that are discussed under this heading. Some of those (in particular, those raised by Radford) are not problems at all and others (in particular, one raised by Walton) are problems, but not problems particular to fiction. In short, ‘the paradox of fiction’ is neither a paradox nor is it related to fiction.

June 21st from 3pm to 5pm: Robert Stecker (Central Michigan University)

Film Narrative Reception : Seeing-In, Imagined Seeing, and Imagining that

This talk initially addresses the debate about whether we imagine seeing characters and their actions in films. There are several different imagined seeing theses that have been advanced. What I shall call the general thesis is simply that we imagine, in some manner or other, seeing characters in films. I bypass the standard objections that have already advanced against this thesis, to argue that the concept of seeing-in can be used to develop an alternative account of our experience of fictional films that has all of the advantages of the general imagined seeing thesis, but none of the purported problems. I then turn to another, more controversial imagined seeing thesis which asserts that in engaging with mainstream narrative films, we do not imagine seeing characters directly, but through a motion-picture-like medium. Call this the mediated version. This version is important because it is a crucial step in arguing that mainstream films typically have narrators. I offer three objections to this thesis and show that an argument for the thesis offered by George Wilson can be undercut if we adopt the seeing-in account.
Finally, I ask about the actual contribution of the imagination in the reception of narrative films. It is plausible that our emotional involvement with a film-fiction requires at least propositional imagining The seeing-in view is compatible with the idea that there are many aspect of a fiction that we propositionally imagine. I distinguish three kinds or degrees of imaginative involvement in a fiction world, and, based on this distinction, try to resolve a debate about the nature of emotional responses to fiction.